Smartthings Technical Support is Completely Worthless (except Brad_ST who deserves a promotion)

Like many others I have been an avid user and supporter of Smartthings,. I want Smartthings to continue to evolve into a product and service that people are excited to adopt, the way that I was when I first jumped on board.

Samsung has made many mistakes in its evolution. Many users were negatively impacted by the merger of their Samsung and Smartthing accounts. I was one of those effected and I ended up with two “Home” locations, neither of which I can delete.

Over the last three weeks I have contact Support over half a dozen times. The aptitude level of the support agents is less than that of the average Community poster. Each time I call I spend half an hour to an hour on hold before I get a representative. The agents repeatedly put me on hold for five to ten minutes at ta time. They instruct me to perform all the steps that I have repeatedly performed to no avail. After wasting an average of an hour and half on each call, I am told that they can not help and will put in an escalation ticket. I never receive a call back. My issues are never resolved.

Finally, I decided to factory reset my Hub, which was supposed to remove my Devices and Locations. It did not, so I manually removed Everything. I still could not delete either location. I added all my devices back but can’t add routines. This is well documented in the forums and the answer is to call Support. I have called them many times about this issue without success. I have had no Routines for over 2 weeks now.

Honestly, I hate to trash a product that I once loved. But Samsung is doing everything in its power to get me to leave.

So here’s my question: WTF do I have to do to get Support to fix my problems?

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Let us know if you find out…

I can only suggest keep calling until you get a helpful and skilled support tech.

At what point do I cut my losses? I already have over 20 hours invested attempting to solve these issues. (Which were caused SOLELY BY SAMUSNG!) I could have installed a competitor’s product in a fraction of that time. My time is of value to me. Calling out Smarttings Support in public is a last resort.

Did you go through the process of setting either of the Home Locations to default (set to true)?

Of course I did. (I regularly search and read the forums for all issues before calling Support.) The problem is that I cannot edit that field in either location. Both locations have the “default” field grayed out, are set to “true” and can not be changed.

Screenshots have been sent to Support, escalations tickets created several times. No fix, no call backs, no emails.

you have tried logging in to IDE (with an incognito/private tab in your browser) at https://account.smartthings.com

yes, I know you probably have but I’m just trying to help :slight_smile:

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@jkp yes I have, I appreciate that.

I’m not so concerned about the “phantom” home location. The real issue is that I haven’t had any Routines for over two weeks now.

I bet it is very frustrating

last question - you are using the main account when logging into IDE and not a secondary (guest) user account that you created?

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There was a change regarding automatic installation of Hello Home which includes Routines. If a user signs into the Classic SmartThings app, they should install automatically. I think there is a bug regarding that though and filed a bug report for it.

If you navigate to your installed SmartApps in the IDE and it looks like the screenshot below, ask support to install Hello Home and Routines for you. I’ve also asked internally if there is an endpoint that we can share so users can self-install that.

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Brad_ST has put a fix on my account and has given me a quite complicated explanation of what the issue is. YES, I now have Routines!

@jkp Apparently I have two “Accounts” both with the same name (myemail@gmail.com). One is a "pre-migration and one is post-migration.

I also have a shared account for my wife which is essentially the cause of the two locations issue referenced here: Two default locations?

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So… how do we get a promotion :stars: for @Brad_ST?

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Same frustration with me. Nobody respond for 7 days. I have ST for 3 years working fine but now its time to change to Vera or Wink. What do you think is better option?

Hubitat! :slight_smile:

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It is odd for sure what ST is doing. With the size of company they are, they probably have tens of thousands of developers. Yet it seems like they have only one dedicated to ST. And all that person does is push out incremental firmware changes every once in a while. No real significant development like the mess that is the 2 app issue. How long has it been now??? Who in their right mind would buy into this platform at this point? Hindsight.

Samsung could so easily own the space. Probably not the low end like telling Alexa/Google to turn on or off some lights, but everything above that. But right now they are little more than the Raspberry Pi of smart home automation. Yes, you can do just about anything with it. The sky’s the limit and all. But damn, it’s painful, time consuming and complex to do most of it. I takes people with lots of time on their hand and lots of determination.

I’m guessing that they are not selling a whole lot of hubs, and of those that have been sold, many are unplugged on a junk electronics shelf or still plugged in and just sitting there with bad memories of such promise.

I wonder if ST are thinking a wait and see approach. Clearly the smart home ecosystem is in its infancy and could go in any direction (Alexa/Google for much of it), but they could carve out a decent space to exist in. Figure out what people are doing and make it Apple simple. Buy and incorporate some of the extension companies/products. Make it seamless and incorporated into ST. I don’t see why it’s so hard for an enormous company like Samsung and a leading product like Smartthings.

If you build it, they will come. If you ignore it, they will leave.

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Samsung has a different market goal Than most of the people in this forum. But then most of the people in this forum don’t represent Most of their customer base.

They’ve told us many times that the majority of their customers have fewer than 15 devices and never use any custom code. Not even a DTH. But quite often a couple of those devices are a Samsung television and a Samsung smart appliance.

So all Samsung really wants Is a system that will let someone who wants a plug and play platform set up a scene that has their television and a few smart lights that they can activate from the family hub refrigerator using Bixby.

They aren’t quite there yet, but they are getting close, and that is an area where there has been pretty much continual improvement over the last couple of years. Certainly the new app is much better than the previous Connect app for both appliances and televisions.

It’s not the Jetsons house goal that many of the people in this forum want, but it’s a huge market with a decent profit margin and it’s likely what they need to be able to continue to compete in the high-end television and appliance segment.

It’s not a trajectory that is likely to satisfy a lot of the forum members here, but I think that goal is Pretty low on their priority list, just judging from where they put their resources.

People who love Webcore or ST_anything won’t be very happy, but they certainly have alternatives, including Hubitat and Homeseer and The various open source projects like Home Assistant (HASS.io )

Every system has pluses and minuses (homeseer doesn’t have much zigbee support and Hubitat doesn’t yet have a mobile app and is still essentially in beta) so there’s a lot of research to be done to find the best match to your own needs, but there are certainly candidates.

From a business standpoint, contrast profit made from smart televisions with profit made from $79 home automation hubs, and it’s pretty easy to see where the smart investment money goes.

Just sayin’…

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I just moved off Homeseer. It works great for Zwave. But I have a mix of Zwave and Zigbee. For Zigbee it is unreliable. There is a Zigbee 3rd party plug-in that works somewhat, but it requires you to run the deConz app at the same time, with the ConBee Zigbee interface. I found it constantly duplicating devices, and messing up room designations. I love the new Smartthings v3 hub with both Zwave and Zigbee interfaces. I retired hundreds of dollars worth of HomeSeer software for a $63 SmartThings v3 hub. Huge improvement in stability.

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I think it will be a steep uphill climb for Samsung, at least in the US. Most people already have either Google Assistant or Alexa, and are not going to want to have a Bixby. That race is essentially already over, no room for a third in the US. Ask Cortana or Siri…

Thus, consumers will want their (any brand) refrigerator or TV to be controlled by they hub/assistant they have, not a stack of hubs or assistants, each to control one company’s products. That will drive purchasing decisions and thus the market. IMO it already has.

Siri is actually very popular as long as you already bought the iPhone. Or the Apple Watch, when Siri is great. And a lot of people, myself included, use both Siri and one of the standalone smart speakers, just using which one based on where we are and what we’re doing.

Apple has released data which says

Currently, Siri is accessed on more than 375 million Apple devices across 36 countries on a monthly basis.

I doubt if many of those people bought an Apple device in order to get Siri, but if they have an Apple device, there are hundreds of millions of people who do use it at least once in a while.

Bixby will come preinstalled on Samsung phones and in Samsung smart applIances. People will still buy standalone voice assistants, and HomePod is a very distant third right now. But a lot of people who are choosing a Samsung device for other purposes will use Bixby if it works well for a particular use case.

Samsung has already said that some home automation features will only be available if you are using Bixby. As long as they are valuable features, and you don’t have to do anything extra or pay anything extra to have Bixby, I think it will have a place. But we will see. :sunglasses:

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I have always believed that Smartthings should have two distinct marketing channels. One for Consumers and one for Professionals. Pro’s would have certification and their own technical support reps. Smartthings sort of attempted this with the ADT partnership but neither party seemed to properly market. Many consumers either don’t have the aptitude or don’t have the time or desire to setup and configure their sophisticated home automation system. Hence the need for Professionals in the business.

Most professionals that I speak with are not proponents of WiFi, Hub-less, and cloud based HA. Most believe that a Hub is a necessary nexus of the HA system that speaks disparate protocols and mediums. Most of them believe that all processing should take place Locally and not in the Cloud. They want this because their high paying customers with their high fluent setups don’t want to pay for a HA system that relies on Internet connectivity. So it would make sense that a Smartthings Pro line would allow all processing to run locally and would probably come with a end user licensing fee. This is not to say that the Cloud and mobile connectivity don’t still have their place.

Unfortunately, it does seem that Smartthings is dumbing down and moving towards proprietary modelling (Bixby) and targeting the low end consumer market. It’s really a shame because the Original Open Architecture of Smartthings seems like it will become a thing of the past.

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